Heart transplant for Ion made easy

New "heart" for your Ionreview by Young Choi

For close to a year now, one of the biggest questions to be asked was when an aftermarket board for the Smart Parts Ion would become available. Some companies have released them but the biggest Achilles heal to the whole Ion board is the solenoid. The solenoid is attached to the circuit board.

The guts of it all

Smart Parts recently unveiled the Blackheart circuit board for the Ion. Smart Parts also has a Blackheart circuit board available for the SP8, Nerve, Shocker, and Impulse. The Ion Blackheart circuit board consists of a new board, solenoid, eyes, eye wiring harness, and hoses. The Blackheart circuit board is a drop-in upgrade. You only need to retain your banjo fittings. Installation was a snap and very painless. I even lubed up the Ion again seeing as how I already had it disassembled.

Upon powering up and following the user-friendly manual setting the Ion to any of the modes was a breeze. The new speaker is quite louder than the stock version so confirming an adjustment is easy as well. Speaking of adjustments, the Blackheart board has more adjustments and options than NASA has at Houston (okay maybe that is an exaggeration, but there are enough options/modes/adjustments to make my head spin initially).

The stock board is capped at 17 balls per second, even I thought 17 balls per second was fast, but that additional 3 bps that comes out makes the Ion even more lethal. The Blackheart board allows a user to fine tune the Ion to a personal liking even more. I like the “Shots Fired” feature cuz you can control when the Ion will go into the enhanced mode of PSP ramping or NXL full-auto. For safety this is a huge plus not to mention you won’t shoot a burst over the chronograph.

The “Kick-In” and “Sustain Rate” are also great features that allow finer tuning of the Ion. The “Kick-In” feature is based upon how low you set your bps for the enhance mode to kick in. If you tie it with the “Shots Fired” you can tailor your gun to shoot enhanced immediately or at a later time. The “Sustain Rate” feature will tailor how many bps the gun has to have to maintain the enhanced mode. For example I set the “Shots Fired” to three trigger pulls, “Kick-In” at five bps, “Sustain Rate” at five bps, and PSP mode at 15 bps. The Ion will go to 15 bps ramping after three trigger pulls at five bps. If I only did pull-pause-pull-pause-pull and kept that up the ramp would not kick in due to me not breaking the five bps limit that I set on the “Kick-In” feature. Once I got the Ion ramping, I only needed to maintain five bps on the trigger to keep the ramp going. Now, if I set the max rate of fire to 20 bps, “Kick-In” at one, and “Sustain Rate” at one I get a very unsafe but very fast shooting full-auto Ion.

The multiple adjustments that the Blackheart offers are more than enough for any Ion enthusiast. I highly recommend this board to any Ion owner out there. Great thing is that it is warranteed by Smart Parts so you have no need to worry about customer support if anything were to go wrong.